Adding to my list of "I guess no one got it" movies... Starship Troopers. I like Verhoeven. So that helps. But I had never seen this movie before becuase I assumed it was a big dumb "perfect teens in space fighting stuff" movie. But it isn't. It's a pure propaganda piece on the insanity of fascism. While also being a silly, entertaining action flick. Which is why Verhoeven is so good. He can make a movie for the "ah cool! shit explodes!" crowd while SIMULTANEOUSLY talking about deeper socio/political issues. The Fourth Man is a movie about a mysterious chick who may or may not be a man eater, and a treatise on the psycho/sexual condition, and a movie about faith, and a movie about gender roles, and a movie about the nature of trust, etc. And it's also Verhoven's "fuck you" to people who claimed his movies didn't say enough, weren't arty enough, weren't symbolic enough.Total Recall is a big dumb action flick about Mars. It is also about a society that's so at its wits end with numbness that it's perfectly acceptable to pay people to implant memories, make you a different person, change who you are on a basic level (going through all the hallmarks of psychosis)... just for a lark. Robocop is a movie about a guy who is killed and torn apart but made into a cybernetic crime fighting machine. It's also about the cheapness of humanity. It's also about how you will always serve a purpose if you have something that can be marketted. It's about our drive toward hyper-technological advances at the expense of anything human.

See, it almost sounds like I'm *joking*. And who knows, I'm probably full of shit. But I *like* what I've seen in them enough to decide that Verhoeven has been pulling the wool over a lot of eyes for the past 20 years or so and no one has really noticed.

See, I'd always seen it, and sort of liked it in some deep down way that I could never place. It will never be on a list of favorite movies, but I think that I concentrated more on the "is this real or is this something implanted" aspect to the thing than all the actiony crap in between.

Also, not being a fan or Arnie makes it hard to really dig that movie for me. I think he was a good casting choice action/money making wise, but bad for the story since he's a non-acting fool.

I still haven't seen Constantine. I have a feeling that that's going to be a "when I can NetFlix it" thing.

I think my big problem with TR was that the ads made it look like it raised some interesting epistimological questions when in fact, the movie ran far from them as fast as possible.

And, yeah, Constantine is not a run-out-and-see-it-now movie, but given the advance word, I really expected it to be horrid. And it's actually ok. Hell, I even wound up not thinking Keanu's casting was the work of satan. I mean, it's stupid casting, but it could have been worse - a position I really expected to not take.

I liked Total Recall. The action was so ridiculously overblown it's hard to imagine that someone could fail to see that it was about more than that. Robocop is an absolutely excellent satire, and though it's less clever and more gratuitous, I like the second one too, of only for the comedy value.

The clincher is an advert for "sunblock 3000" with a disclaimer at the end reading "frequent use may cause skin cancer".